Professional Webmaster Business Issues Forum

Here goes another postÖ I want to know how some of you run multiple websites.

- How do you organize yourselves? What sort of tricks do you do? - Do you run all your sites on one server? - Do you have separate folders for each site? - Do you treat the accounting of each seperately or all together collectively?

Iím going down that path now and I see myself getting flustered down the road and need to know how you guys deal with the different stuff for each site

Just stuff that I know would be a PITA (or impossible) to recover if my comp crashed. They all get their own manila folder in my portable filing cabinet (plastic, not metal... easy to grab in case of emergency).

Is there not some risk involved in running all sites on one server? Even for no malicious fault of your own you could get one of your sites banned by Google, and this could transpire onto your other sites as well, or?

It seems like a good idea to spread your risks by using several servers or hosting services for your sites.

Would Google go as far as banning all sites on a particular server, or all sites owned by a particular company or individual (would Google check Whois systematically like that)?

My biggest fear of having all my sites on one host is if they go down, then all your sites go down. I have a very very good relationship with my host though, which makes it more easy for me to resolve any problems that occur.

I just recently picked up a book called "Getting things done" by David Allen and it has helped me out tremendously although I have a long way to go...its a no frills system that seems to be working for me to organize my different things.

I use Post-It software's whiteboards. It's a more "visual" setup, with ability to set alarms for whatever (deadlines, anyone? *laughing*).

It's not expensive, it's sharable over intranet or internet, through email, or printable. You can have as many whiteboards as you need, with as many notes as you need, sorted as you prefer. I have one board for each site, with tabs for "sketch notes", "check on", "deadlines", billing info, etc. depending on the site and situation. I store links to stuff I need for a specific site (like to many of the css posts here on WebmasterWorld!), general reminders, contact info for the site's primaries....

Generally, I find it easier to focus on one site at a time which could be in 10 minute intervals or days. If there is a lesson to be learned from one site to another I try to do it or write it down so I will do it later.

I have personally built well over 500 web sites over the last 7 years. It seems like a allot and it is, I have had some success in some template programs for targetted industries.

Anyways, this is simple.

On your hard drive make on folder called websites then name the folders the domain name. Then create one folder and call it support for every web site. In this support folder you store, your admin files (host, domain, email accounts in notepad) another folder called PSD (my photoshop source files), another called content (this is stuff I get from the client, I always save it), a folder for flash (flash source files and the content it took to create it), a folder called backups (this is a folder for database back ups etc.) and so on.